


Disposable

by SLWalker



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Rebels
Genre: Gen, Post Twin Suns
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-07
Updated: 2017-11-07
Packaged: 2019-01-30 21:20:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12661641
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SLWalker/pseuds/SLWalker
Summary: In the once-living world, the comfort of an enemy.  In this dead one, the comfort of a brother.





	Disposable

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Pomodoridori](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pomodoridori/gifts).



> Written off of a prompt. I normally don't do canon without an AU, but did this time.

“I was trying to tell you not to.”

They say voice is one of the earliest things to vanish from memory, but can spark back a thousand more when heard again. It had been many years since Maul had heard that one, but upon its renewal, the pieces came back more clearly than the time-eroded fragments he had quietly been clinging to.

His mind had not been so clear in years. If truth be told, more of his life had been spent under the pall of some manner of madness than had not.

With his life, the last of Lotho Minor, the last of the witch’s headgames, the last of his long isolation faded away, and for a moment, he was again standing on his own feet, in his own skin, possessed of his own mind.

On that last point, perhaps for the first time.

Savage was not his hulking self, but thin bordering too much so, sharp cheekbones which told a story of long stints of hunger, but his eyes were pale and not burning yellow, and his horns were short and intentionally blunted.

“Habit,” Savage said, when he caught Maul inspecting them silently. A smile, both sad and lonely, crossed his mouth. “When Feral was small, I would shave them. I kept doing it because even after he was grown, other children would live in our village, and I would help teach them how to play and hunt and wrestle.”

It said something, Maul thought, that such a scene felt as foreign to him as freedom would, or did, or should. Of community, or family; of some strange other-state where lessons were taught by brothers and not lightning or burns or broken bones.

Somewhere on the sands of Tatooine, his broken husk had breathed its last. Left without any drive, he felt only exhaustion.

“Did you know our mother?” he asked, the sound of his own voice near foreign, no longer laced with the utter madness of a twisted psyche; once, long ago, he had always spoken with such a voice, where he had no need nor desire to raise it in ranting or raging once he grew out of boyhood.

“No,” Savage answered.

It was not the witch. Without her magic wrapped around the fragmented pieces of his mind, holding it in some semblance of shape, Maul knew that instinctively. As with all things in his life, he did not know what of his _feelings_ had been real, or not real; what had been manipulated. But he knew that he had been.

He nodded _(thought he nodded, felt he nodded)_ and looked down his black-clad form, to leather boots; felt at his hip the heavy weight of his staff, a specter of something he had made himself and for himself two or three lifetimes back.

The wave of ache through his hearts made him waver on his feet.

“You weren’t old enough to die,” Savage said, his own voice gone thicker. Even as broken as he was _(had been)_ , Maul knew his brother mourned him. “I tried to tell you to turn away.”

“I thought I heard you. But–” Maul tilted his head in something of a shrug, too heavy to even raise his shoulders, and left it there.

It seemed Savage must have understood. Despite the mournful look on his face, there was something which resonated with that statement. “We were all disposable, except to each other,” he said, both acceptance of the fact and regretful for it.

“I wish I had known you,” Maul said back, and it was truth; he knew his brother only as a witch’s twisted tool, though his brother’s hearts were such that even in that state, something of him remained strong enough to love.

Savage nodded, slowly. “I wish you had, too.”

In the once-living world, the comfort of an enemy. In this dead one, the comfort of a brother. Somehow at the end only, could Maul accept either as being real and since there was no fight left in him now – had not been even in those last moments, not really, only madness and sunstroke and desperation and exhaustion – he just rested his cheek against his brother’s shoulder, when Savage folded him in, and let that be the last thing that he would ever know.


End file.
